Lexeme
A
lexeme is an abstract
unit of
morphological analysis in
linguistics, that roughly corresponds to a set of
words that are different forms of "the same word". For example, English
run,
runs,
ran and
running are forms of the same lexeme. A related concept is the
lemma (or
citation form), which is a particular form of a lexeme that is chosen by convention to represent a canonical form of a lexeme. Lemmas are used in dictionaries as the
headwords, and other forms of a lexeme are often listed later in the entry if they are unusual in some way.
A lexeme belongs to a particular
syntactic category, has a particular
meaning (
semantic value), and in inflecting languages, has a corresponding
inflectional paradigm; that is, a lexeme in many languages will have many different
forms. For example, the lexeme for
run has a present third person singular form
runs, a present non-third-singular form
run, a past form
ran, and a present
participle running. The use of the forms of a lexeme is governed by rules of
grammar; in the case of English verbs such as
run, these include subject-verb agreement and compound tense rules, which determine which form of a verb can be used in a given sentence.
A
lexicon consists of lexemes.
In many
formal theories of
language, lexemes have
subcategorization frames to account for the number and types of complements they occur within
sentences and other
syntactic structures.
The notion of a lexeme is very central to
morphology, and thus, many other notions can be defined in terms of it. For example, the difference between
inflection and
derivation can be stated in terms of lexemes:
* Inflectional rules relate a lexeme to its forms.
* Derivational rules relate a lexeme to another lexeme.
*
Morphology (linguistics)*
Lexicography*
Lexical word vs.
grammatical word*
Meme
